Warner Music Group’s Corporate Socialism

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 31, 2008

Let me see if I got this right. The Warner Music Group wants you pay for the kid down the street who downloads illegal MP3s. You will have no choice. You will be hit with a “surcharge” on your monthly ISP bill and, by the way, there will be no opt-in or out option. Get used to it because criminal gangs in expensive suits run the country. Caroline McCarthy writes for CNet News:

Hotels tack extra charges onto your bill when you raid the minibar–or if they’re really mean, when you steal towels. If a new Warner Music Group executive gets his way, your Internet service provider will be billing you each month for music downloads.

Jim Griffin, Warner’s latest top-shelf hire and the former head of Geffen Music, told Portfolio.com the details of a radical new strategy to deal with the record industry’s 21st-century crisis. According to Griffin’s plan, to which he said Warner Music is “totally committed,” a monthly fee added to an Internet service bill–say, five bucks–could give consumers unlimited access to music that they could download, copy, and share.

He estimated that this could provide as much $20 billion per year to reimburse artists and copyright holders.

Griffin did not make it clear whether this would be an opt-in service, or whether customers of an Internet service provider would ideally all be charged even if they don’t plan to download music. But, he said, he hopes that it would be much bigger than Warner, with the project eventually spun into its own company.

You know when corporate honchos say they are totally committed,” they plan to “lobby” the government, that is to say spin the turnstile at the corporate whorehouse on the Potomac and throw around a load of money to get their way.

In addition to run of the mill corporate greed, the Warner Music Group wants to make the public pay for the fact CD sales are on the rocks. The so-called music industry tells us they are losing money because of mischievous downloaders and bit torrent criminals. In fact, the music industry is losing money because they no longer produce music people want to buy or less people want to buy. It also does not help that a new CD costs around twenty bucks, a lot of money to shell out for most people.

Music corporations are part and parcel of the monopoly mindset and the best way to hijack your hard-earned money is to pass another law — sort of like the mandatory auto insurance laws — that codifies and legalizes theft.

Of course, you don’t have to have an ISP and an internet connection, same as you don’t need a car.